How to Winterize Your Mobile Home for Winter and Cut Costs

Some great ideas to weather proof your mobile for the winter and keep your home comfortable and warm during the winter, not to mention lowering your heating bills.

If you live in a mobile home, you know that year-round the bills are high. They stay high in the summer, because you're running the air. The electricity bill goes crazy in the winter just to keep you warm, and the reason for this: Is that most mobile homes are not insulated well at all.

For the do-it-yourself person, this is a simple fix for a small amount of change. You can and will decrease your electric bills by least $60 per month.

The first suggestion; go to your local Lowe's or Home Depot, and purchase some thick insulation. First thing you want to do is speak to the manager so that you can get a discount because you're buying in quantity. Make sure you have the measurements of your mobile say; it's a 14 x 70 figure out the width of the insulation and the length of the insulation you are purchasing and do your math ahead of time.

So you will know how many bales of insulation to buy and can get the best deal.

You're also going to want to cover the insulation after it's installed. So you want to look for some heavy duty plastic to put over it.

You are also going to need a lot of staples and an electric staple gun.

If your mobile home has skirting just peel back the section, crawl underneath and start rolling out your insulation. Make sure that you staple it like crazy, putting in insulation is actually pretty easy job.

Work around and leave cutouts for any pipes or electrical wires that you may need to get to and just cut your insulation around that. This is easier if you're working with two people as one can be doing the cutting while the other is underneath stapling.

Once the insulation is in place and stapled well then it is time to install the tarp. You want to place this tarp in place, so that's nice and tight, again, you will be doing the cutouts to work around pipes, which is not a problem because then you just super staple in those areas.

I personally just did this to my mobile home, and my electric bills were running roughly $206-$225 a month each and every month. I just received my first electric bill after insulating and my bill had gone down $65. I expect that to be even higher next month as that bill was only for three weeks of me having insulation and not the full four weeks of the bill.

Now, if you don't have skirting. Of course the job is much easier to do because its easy access in and out. However, that brings me to my next step, skirting makes a huge difference in insulating your mobile home. You don't get the wind drafts flying up underneath there from the cold and in the summer you don't get all the heat accumulating underneath.

Insulation can be done fairly cheap, and it can be done by yourself. If you call a company to do this job for you. It will run you approximately $1500 if you do it yourself, It will cost you a about $500.

Now to put on skirting, you can do this many different ways.

1. You can buy plywood cut it to size and screw it on.

2. You can buy lattice and put a plastic backing behind it and screw that on.

Or three you can go to a local scrap yard, and they have pieces of steel all over that they will sell you for a cheap price.

When you are done you can paint it to match the house and it looks great.

Another thing that you really want to make sure that you do is to insulate the roof. The best way to do this on a mobile home is again, go to Home Depot or Lowe's or any hardware store and you'll buy a 5 gallon bucket of roof coating.

It is not typical roof coating this is an insulated roof coating, sometimes known as snow roof or snow coat, although it does come in different names. You will know it's a correct stuff because it is white.

At the same time that you're purchasing this buy yourself a paint roller and if you don't have a large or extra broom handle or some type of tool to be able to stand and roll this out with buy yourself a pole.

At this point, you get up on the roof start in one corner and roll the coating on. I recommend using two coats, however, make sure that the first coat is completely dried before you go to apply the second coat.

Another great thing to do if you cannot afford to put in new windows is in the winter time buy yourself a roll of painters plastic put plastic up on the inside of all your windows. Now you can't see out quite as well, but the wind also cannot get it.

These few steps that I have outlined will drastically reduce your electric bill. Your heating and your cooling bill by at least 45%.

By simple math, lets say your electric bills currently runs at $200 a month, which in turn costs you $2400.00 per year. Now we reduce that bill by the minimum of 45% and now your bill is $110.00 per month and $1320.00 per year.

You have now just saved yourself $1080.00 per year. These figures are based on the adding the insulation alone. If you put up skirting and plastic on the windows you can expect your bill to drop to about $90 per month, which adds up to a huge savings.

The cost for all of this will run you about $600 for everything, so you have saved money the very first few months. In fact you have now paid yourself back what you put out and are now putting money in your pocket each month.

Good morning Lori. You did a fantastic job with this article
but, there's always a but, isn't there ;-)). If you are going to
use plywood as skirting, make sure that it's an exterior grade or
marine grade plywood or it's going to warp and rot even if you
paint it. Also, insulating the underside of your mobile home has
another advantage besides reducing your heating and cooling bills,
it can keep you from suffering frozen and busted water pipes in the
dead of winter. Oh, yeah, I live in a mobile home community located
in the mountains of upstate New York.

Your question will also be posted as a public question in the Knoji forums, so be sure to phrase it as a general question that anyone could answer. Personal questions and private messages should be sent using the Message Me feature instead.

To maintain a high standard for new discussions started, each Knoji member is limited to a certain number of questions each day. Use your questions wisely, ask quality questions and you'll get quality answers.

Credits refresh at midnight US Central time, at which time you'll receive your next day's allotment of credits.

When people like the answers you provide, they make a public acknowledgement by placing a vote for your answer. The more votes you accumulate on Knoji, the higher you move up in rank. Increased rank gives you increased capabilities, more perks and more expert cred around the site.

We limit the number of questions members can ask on Knoji each day in order to improve the quality of questions and answers. Your question credits will reset each day at midnight US Central time, so come back then to ask more questions!

Contributors on Knoji are awarded Levels as they establish themselves as experts within the community. There are three ways in which users can increase their level, via writing articles or via answering questions, or both.

Your primary job as an Ambassador is to kick off thoughtful discussion threads around products, services. Your discussions can be on any topic in Knoji's category system. Here are some examples of the types of discussions you'll be starting:

Requests for recommendations for any type of product or service, examples:

People on Knoji ask questions seeking recommendations for products and services. We encourage our community members to answer questions whenever you can make a useful recommendation towards any request.

People on Knoji ask questions seeking recommendations for products and services. We encourage our community members to answer questions whenever you can make a useful recommendation towards any request.

When pointing to specific products, please link to specific product pages on Amazon.com or Walmart.com (Ambassadors: You earn increased rewards when doing this)

You should include screenshots of the products you recommend (Ambassadors: you earn increased rewards when doing this)

Try to recommend products that you've had personal experience with. If not, it is acceptable to recommend products or options based on thorough research you do online.

Asking questions

On Knoji, you can ask any question about any consumer or shopping-related topic. Many questions involve requests for recommendations for any type of product or service, examples:

To qualify as a working coupon, the link or code must provide a discount above and beyond what's freely available by default on the vendor's site.

To check this, first click the link and check that the coupon can be applied and does provide the discount described. Then, in a different browser, open the vendor's site (without using the Knoji link) and check whether that same discount is available to any user by default. If it's not, and the coupon works, then you've found a qualified coupon and can verify it and get your earnings. If not, you can verify that it does not work (explain why this is) and you'll earn a smaller credit.

Don't waste your time verifying invalid coupons! Before you receive payment, all your verifications will be reviewed, and if they are invalid, you earnings will be deleted. Verify only valid coupons in order to receive payment for this project.